Ithaca, New York, probably had more than three areas: College Town and the University, Downtown Ithaca, and Cayuga Heights, but these were our three places for new adventures. Without a formal honeymoon we had to make do with what we had.
Most of my life, in my first year at Cornell, had been centered on the University and its nearby College Town. I had examined every shop and eating place in the half dozen square blocks at the edge of the campus and reexamined them when Karen finally joined my life there.
We did expand our restaurants to include Downtown places, from dives to the Victoria, an Italian restaurant where fancy meals were planned for special occasions. When we moved from the Heights to West Shore Drive, we found Obie’s Diner near the Inlet to Lake Cayuga, in the folds of Ithaca’s underbelly. (We later moved only a few blocks away, on Floral Avenue.) Obie’s was famous for its hamburger with a fried egg and melted cheese on top.
Our stop for a late-night drive was the Ithaca Bakery, which, at that time, sold only bread, with a fragrance that could seduce any student within a mile’s radius. We usually carried a loaf home and consumed a smaller, freshly baked one on the way back to our apartment.
Inexpensive, newlywed entertainment routinely consisted of a movie at one the four theaters in Ithaca: the “Near-Near,” the “Near-Far,” the “Far-Near” and the “Far-Far” – named as a result of their distances from the University. After a movie, we might stop at Willard Straight Hall, the student union building, for coffee and late-night, student-originated entertainment. At the time, we did not appreciate that two or three years later, Pete Yarrow would become one-third of the “Peter, Paul and Mary” folk group, but we did enjoy listening to his personal gig there in the Ivy Room, the place for eating and for drinking gallons of coffee.
The Straight was also the place where Karen worked – upstairs, in the Student Affairs Office, as a secretary. Given the supply of potential teachers among faculty wives, it was impossible for student wives to be hired in the local high school. Her hours there each day, until our daughter was born, brought in the extra money for our honeymoon luxuries. My $300/month pay as a teaching assistant in biochemistry went toward our daily living expenses.
Although it was convenient living in Cayuga Heights and its nearby cluster of shops and groceries, we began looking for a “quaint” apartment. In the fall of 1958, Karen and I moved from our small apartment in the Heights to another one on West Shore Drive along the Lake. We now resided in a very romantic spot overlooking the water that lapped at the dock twenty feet below the edge of the property owned by the Ripley’s, who managed the local VW dealership. At the time, I even enjoyed the long climb up the stairs between the lake and our wooded landscape. It had been a magnificent autumn for our honeymoon year. We had a fireplace in our ground-floor apartment. Winter, however, was settling in; the fireplace burned every evening.
We may not have had a week-long honeymoon on an Island in the Pacific or in the Carribean, but we finally had our own romantic hideout, and for a longer time than many couples could take for a formal honeymoon.